Exa – A Modern Replacement for “ls Command” Written in Rust

Aaron Kili

7 months ago

Exa - Linux ls Command Replacement

Exa is a lightweight, fast and modern replacement for the popular ls command on Unix-like operating systems. It is written in Rust programming language and comes with several additional features not available in the traditional ls command. Importantly, its options are similar, but not exactly the same, as for ls command as we shall see later on.

One of its special feature is the useful colors for differentiating between listed information about various types of files, such as the file owner, group owner, permissions, blocks, inode information etc. All this information is displayed using separate colors.

Exa Features:

Small, fast, and portable.

Uses colors for distinguishing information by default.

It can display a file’s extended attributes, as well as standard filesystem information.

It queries files in parallel.

It has Git support; allows viewing of the Git status for a directory.

Also supports recursing into directories with a tree view.

Requirements:

Rustc version 1.17.0 or higher

libgit2

cmake

Installing Exa in Linux Systems

The easiest way to install exa, is to download a binary file for your Linux distribution and place it under /usr/local/bin. Before doing this, you need to have the recommended version of Rust installed on the system by running the following commands.